


A First Time for Everything

by TheSaddleman



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (1963), Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Boobah, Doctor Who Series 9 spoilers, F/M, First Times, Fluff, Foreshadowing, Friendship, HMS Titanic, Humour, Leonardo Da Vinci - Freeform, Plot Hole Filling, Romance, Spoilers for Titanic (2012 miniseries), Teletubbies, Time Travel, alleviating boredom, almost no angst, continuity cavalcade, whouffaldi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-06-18
Packaged: 2020-05-13 19:21:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19257580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSaddleman/pseuds/TheSaddleman
Summary: Clara Oswald is bored and asks the Doctor to entertain her. After deep discussions about Don't Fear the Reaper and Teletubbies, the Twelfth Doctor decides to take her to the universe's first and biggest light show, the Big Bang. Clara comes up with a memorable way to mark the occasion.





	A First Time for Everything

**Author's Note:**

> This story is set sometime in the second half of Series 9.

“Doctor, I’m bored. Entertain me.”

The Doctor looked up at his companion, Clara Oswald, who was stretched out in his favourite chair on the mezzanine of the TARDIS’ console room. The chair was big, even for the Time Lord’s lanky frame; for someone as petite as Clara, she pretty much had vanished into its cushions when she’d drifted off to sleep while he tinkered with the central rotor in order to stop a rather annoying squeak it had developed of late. 

This had confused the Doctor somewhat—Clara’s nap, that is, not so much the squeak—as he knew full well that his best friend had a perfectly good bed at home (or, at least, she did after he’d replaced her old one, all the while protesting unconvincingly that the TARDIS hadn’t really meant to land on it, flattening it like a pancake and firing the springs through the wallpaper—something else he’d agreed to replace. Clara’s response compared the situation to bovine excrement). After all the trouble he went through to replace it (bed-shopping was not something they taught at the academy on Gallifrey; he always took for granted that they were just there. Who buys a bed? Probably the same mad souls who came up with the concept of a bed- _room_ ), why she chose instead to sleep in _his_ TARDIS, in _his_ favourite chair mystified him. And now there she was, slightly bleary-eyed, asking him to ... do what now?

“Do you want me to go get my guitar? I’ve been meaning to try out my rendition of _Don’t Fear the Reaper_ on someone for ages and every time I suggest it to Kate Stewart, a minor alien invasion happens in Saskatchewan or some such silly place and she has to ring off.”

Clara sat up, stretching. “That actually sounds pretty good, so long as I get to play the cowbell. You know, _I … have a fevah … and the prescription is … more cowbell._ ”

The Doctor stared at her.

“Seriously? Cowbell? ‘ _More fevah_?’ I’ve been doing that Christopher Walken impersonation for years. Nina loves it.”

“I thought you were doing William Shatner.” The Doctor ducked as a cushion made an arc towards his head and bounced off the rotor. “Careful, Clara, Betsy Ross knitted that for me herself. I told her she’d be better off sewing flags.”

“Is there any aspect of human history you weren’t a part of?” Clara asked.

“I take no responsibility for _Geordie Shore_. Such evil is beyond my comprehension. Or _Teletubbies_. That one’s on Jack Harkness.”

“What about _Boobah_ , then?”

“I will not have anyone talk trash about _Boobah_ ,” the Doctor said, sternly. “Kept those lovely folks gainfully employed until I could return them home, and taught a generation of kids about an alien world in the process, alright?”

Half the time Clara couldn’t tell when the Doctor was putting the wind up or when he was being serious. The rest of the time she couldn’t tell when the Doctor was being serious or when he was putting the wind up. After all her years of travelling with him, she’d just learned to go with the flow.

“Back to the topic at hand,” she said, “it’s been weeks since we’ve done anything really exciting. I’ve had more fun listening to the fourth years read _Pride and Prejudice_ aloud in class. Don’t you want to do something really exciting?”

The Doctor scoffed at this. “Not exciting? Not exciting? _Not exciting?_ ” he blustered. Then he realized he’d just done a very Six thing. “Ignore those last two ‘not excitings’—and that last one just now. Anyway, Clara, do you actually call letting Leonardo finish his portrait of you last week not exciting? Especially when Leo ran out of paint and had to borrow some from a neighbour…”

“…who didn’t know it had been contaminated by an alien presence, making the painting come to life. Yes, I remember.”

“Aren’t you relieved the Mona Lisa didn’t look like you after all?”

Clara finally came down to the main level of the console room. The chair’s main cushion having recently become an impromptu projectile, it had lost some degree of comfort and, thus, its appeal. “I spent most of my time trapped inside the painting, nothing to do but sit and stare at the scenery behind me and an empty room in front of me until you and Leonardo figured out how to get me out and put her, or it, or whatever, back in. Being sidelined is not my idea of fun. Speaking of the Mona Lisa, shouldn’t we, like, warn the Louvre or something? If she ever gets out and decides to take revenge, and all that. Could be embarrassing.”

The Doctor smirked. “Don’t worry, it’s all been sorted by now. We could always go visit Jane again and try to win your money back at poker.”

“No, Jane’s mad at me,” Clara frowned.

“Why?”

“Let’s just say she didn’t take my constructive criticism of _Northanger Abbey_ in the spirit in which it was intended.”

“Clara, Clara, Clara, you should know better. Just like there are fixed points in time, there are also fixed points in literature and trying to get your least-favourite Jane Austen novel improved was never going to end well. Especially when you give her a set of notes equal in page count to that the original novel, typed single-space, yet!” The Doctor nearly wagged his finger at Clara before realizing that was a very Five thing to do. His finger was thus left unwagged.

“Be that as it may, the request as originally presented having been left unanswered and satisfaction not obtained, I find myself now repeating: I seek entertainment.”

“That was an awful attempt at doing Jane Austen, Clara.”

“So sue me, I just woke up from a nap. And now that I am awake, it means you have no more excuse to tinker around with this bed-destroying ... so-and-so. Let’s go somewhere exotic and fun and action-filled that leaves us panting and sweaty afterwards.”

The Doctor arched his eyebrow. “Beg pardon?”

Clara was already blushing. “That totally came out … awkward. If you could forget the last fifteen seconds or so, that would be appreciated.”

The Doctor put his finger to his lips in contemplation and Clara had a slight sense of disappointment as she realized he probably had done just that. A few moments later, he suggested: “Deneb IV.”

“Been there. Reminded me too much of an old _Star Trek_ episode.”

“Draconia.”

“Done that. Got the T-shirt, even.”

“Skaro.”

“Seriously? If I want to be attacked by something coming out of the sewers, I’d ask you to take me to New York so I could take my chances with the alligators.”

The Doctor thought for a moment, then nearly clicked his fingers before realizing that was a very One thing to do. His fingers were thus left unclicked.

“We could nip aboard the _Titanic_ for dinner,” he said.

Clara rolled her eyes. “We did that back when you wore the bow tie, remember? And even before the iceberg, the evening got awkward when we ran into one of my echoes, Annie-something…”

The Doctor smacked his head, “who helped save one of my other selves during the sinking. Number Nine, if I recall. Or maybe it was Seven? Sorry, yeah, I forgot. Sometimes I get a little fuzzy on things I did before I became me.”

“Did she survive, by the way?”

“Did who survive?”

“You seem to be a bit fuzzy on things you did ten seconds ago, too. Annie! Annie … Desmond, that was her name. Annie Desmond.”

The Doctor approached a monitor and started typing a query into a keyboard. He stopped typing and looked at Clara intensely. “Do you really want to know?”

Clara looked uncertain for a moment. She knew that things didn’t always end well for the echoes splintered through time who were all subconsciously dedicated to helping the Doctor at key moments throughout his incarnations. “Hoping for the best?” She refused to let the Doctor see her cross her fingers.

He started to type again. A few seconds later, before he had said a thing, Clara’s heart rose when she saw the Doctor beaming. “She made it off _Titanic_ ,” he said. “Not only that, she also went on to survive the sinking of the sister ship, _Britannic_ , when it hit a mine a few years later. That’s so you. Wrote a book about it. Lived to the age of 84.”

Clara was beaming. “I’m glad Winnie Clarence wasn’t a fluke,” she said. Not long after he’d last regenerated, the Doctor had taken Clara to Antarctica where they’d encountered another of Clara’s echoes, who also survived helping the Doctor. Unlike poor Oswin, and Clara Oswin, and so many others who gave their lives so that the Great Intelligence couldn’t wipe the Doctor from history. The tragedy was, none of them ever knew why.

“I’m glad Winnie wasn’t the only survivor,” the Doctor said. “Always good to know where I can find a spare Clara in case I need to make a clo-OW!” The Doctor rubbed his bicep where Clara had rather impressively managed to avoid his finely tuned Venusian aikido-honed reflexes and thump him. “You do know that was just a joke, right?” he muttered, ruefully. “Besides, your toothbrush has more than enough DNA to make a-”

“No cloning, Doctor,” Clara interrupted in her most terrifying schoolteacher voice. “We’ve talked about this before. Friends don’t clone friends.”

“Cloneist.”

“Shut up. No _Titanic_. No Skaro. No UNIT Christmas Party 1973 or 1983, or 1993, for that matter. Somewhere fresh. Somewhere new.”

“UNIT Christmas Party 2003, then?”

Clara just glared at the Doctor. He knew better. But she knew he was already on to the next thought, so she let it pass.

“Well, I could take you back to the beginning,” he said.

“The beginning of what?”

“Everything. The Beginning. The definite article.”

“Can we actually do that?”

The TARDIS made a very convincing attempt at blowing a raspberry. Unfortunately, it was just within her matrix that it was a convincing attempt; all the Doctor and Clara heard were a few beeps. The Doctor got the hint, anyway.

“Don’t insult her,” the Doctor grumped. “The TARDIS is the most powerful time machine ever devised. We could go in the other direction, too. I could take you to stand on the last ember, the last fragment of everything that ever was. But I won’t.”

“Why not?”

“I’d probably end up running into myself and that would be too damn depressing. But the beginning? Everything is new, everything has yet to be. The TARDIS and I have gone back to the beginning before, too, though not really by choice. This time we can do it on purpose and enjoy the scenery for once.”

Clara thought about this a moment. Then a twinkle came to her eye. “I’ve always wanted to be the first.”

“The first what?”

“You’ll see. Let’s do it.”

***

It was easy enough to promise a trip back to what the Doctor referred to as Event One, but the actual calculations to make it happen took a while.

The Doctor spouted some timey-wimey, Stanley Unwin-grade gobbledygook about needing to make sure the TARDIS’ whatchemacallit compensated for the gibberishy thingamewhat so that the hassenfrans booglegutter wouldn’t collapse and kill them all the moment they arrived or, worse still, cause the TARDIS to overshoot the nammerstuff threshold, which apparently would have annoyed a bunch of something-somethings called the Old Ones. He also started mumbling to himself about a thing called Terminus and made a show of putting a strip of duct tape over a toggle on the console labelled the Fast Return Switch. Clara, while all this was going on, discovered that a standing-up catnap made the time go by much quicker and she made a note to put it into practice at the next Coal Hill School staff meeting.

Once the TARDIS was finally in the vortex, the Doctor announced that it would take about two hours to reach Event One. Normally, travel between two points in time was virtually instantaneous, which was why TARDISes were generally programmed to (emergencies notwithstanding) delay arrival by a reasonable length of time in order to allow their crews to eat, sleep, or do the necessary research to prepare for their destination. But there were no failsafes needed this time: it was going to be a longer-than-usual trip to go that far back.

So, Clara proposed taking advantage of the time to dress to the nines.

“Why the nines, Clara? Isn’t my jumper good enough? It’s not like we’re going to run into the Fashion Police.”

Clara put her hands on the Doctor’s shoulders: “Doctor, we’re visiting the universe on its birthday. The atoms that formed you, me, Elvis, and everyone else we’ve ever known are about to be created. If that’s not an excuse for fancy dress, I don’t know what is. No debate, we’re raiding the wardrobe.”

“Yes, boss.”

***

Clara was adjusting the Doctor’s bow tie in the wardrobe room when a thunderous _thump_ sounded through the corridors to signal that the TARDIS had arrived at Event One.

“There, now you look like a gentleman,” Clara said. She flicked his tie with an index finger. “Bring back any fond memories?”

“Clara, there’s a reason why I don’t go around wearing velvet dinner jackets, a long scarf, a cricketeer’s uniform, or a trench coat anymore. It doesn’t feel right to steal their look.”

The Doctor frowned as Clara stepped away and he examined his reflection in the full-length mirror. The bow tie capped a tuxedo that would have fit in well in a James Bond movie. He thought he looked damn good, actually. Of course, he wasn’t going to admit that to her. 

Clara laughed. “Oh come on, Doctor, it’s just a tie. It’s not like I popped a fez on your head.” She happened to glance at the hat stand beside her. “Though, come to mention it….” She grabbed the red fez hanging there. “Come here, you!” 

Clara started to playfully chase the Doctor around the room, and was nearly successful in putting the fez on top of his mane of unruly grey hair, but the Doctor stepped back with a laugh. “Oh no, you don’t! Bow tie, fine. Fez, no.”

Clara pouted, playfully. “Oh, please yourself.” She put the fez back where she’d found it, determined to find a way to get him to wear it again, someday. If there was a planet of perpetual New Year’s Eve parties, she thought, surely there had to be a planet of perpetual space-Shriners’ conventions.

Clara took a look at herself in the full-length mirror. She’d chosen an outfit that once belonged to Romana, one of the Doctor’s earlier companions. After having the TARDIS adjust it for height, the flowing white dress with ruffles around the neck made her look deceivingly angelic. True, it wasn’t the type of outfit she would have worn in public, unless it was to something like the Met Gala but, as she straightened it out after their little chase, Clara thought she looked damn good. Of course, she wasn’t going to admit that to him.

“Are you ready to witness the beginning of everything?” the Doctor said.

“No time like the present,” Clara said as she looped her arm through his.

***

As the Doctor opened the TARDIS doors with a flourish, Clara’s first reaction was one of … disappointment, actually.

“Not much to see, is there,” she said. She was being literal, for outside the TARDIS there was nothing but black. Which technically isn’t “nothing,” of course, but we’ll let the astronomers hash out the semantics. This isn’t a science text book, after all. 

The Doctor handed Clara a pair of welder’s glasses. “Wait for it,” he said gently as she put them on and he checked his watch. “Look directly ahead in five…four…three…two…” He quickly donned his own pair of glasses and looked into the void.

Even through the thick glass of her protective lenses, Clara was dazzled. There were explosions, and then there were _explosions_. In the merest fraction of a merest fraction of a moment, the universe went from undetectable nothingness to a solid ball of light that seemed to give off every colour at once. 

“Wow,” Clara said, softly.

“ _Let there be light_ ,” the Doctor quoted. “They say there’s a first time for everything. Well this, Clara, _is_ the first time for everything.”

Clara turned from the spectacle unfolding beyond the TARDIS’ protective shield to gaze at the Time Lord. “Look at me, Doctor,” she said.

The Doctor, his face appearing to glow from the reflected light of Event One, did as requested.

“Take off those glasses for a moment,” she said as she removed hers.

The Doctor again did as requested, protesting, “But don’t you want to see- _mmph!_ ”

He was cut off as Clara threw her arms around his neck and quickly pulled his face down to meet hers. The kiss only lasted for a few seconds, but during those few seconds the Doctor’s mind protested, considered escape options, examined available evidence to determine whether Clara had lost her mind, and ultimately concluded: _What the hell are you complaining about?_

Clara pulled away, with a smile. 

The Doctor’s quizzical expression was topped with a smile of his own.

“I always wanted to be the very first-ever to do something,” she said. “I wanted to give the universe its first kiss. And who better to share it with?”

“I’m … honoured.” The Doctor could still feel her lips on his. He was hesitant to say much for fear of losing that feeling. Not that he’d ever tell her that, of course.

“They say you never forget your first time, right?” Clara whispered as she put her glasses back on again and returned to gazing out at the birth of her universe.

“I promise you, Clara, I never will,” said the Doctor.

**Author's Note:**

> Concordance time:
> 
> Clara quotes from the famous Saturday Night Live sketch spoofing Don't Fear the Reaper's use of a cowbell, which featured Christopher Walken. And it's very easy to turn an impression of Christopher Walken into an impression of William Shatner.
> 
> Boobah isn't as well known to audiences outside the UK as Teletubbies, but just call it up on YouTube, imagine these are space aliens making a TV show, and you'll see it in a whole new light!
> 
> In some of my stories I have adopted a shorthand the Doctor uses when referring to past incarnations, so when I reference "Six", "One", "Five", etc. I refer to those Doctors and their mannerisms.
> 
> Clara posed for Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa in one of the Titan Comics storylines. As that painting was never fully completed, I have her going back for more sitting. At which point I attempt to tie in the plotline of the Sarah Jane Adventures storyline "Mona Lisa's Revenge" (spot the subtle reference to the title). I didn't try to tie in "City of Death", however.
> 
> According to several Jane Austen fan sites, Northanger Abbey is considered the weakest of her novels. The reference to poker comes from a planned, but never filmed, sequence from "Face the Raven" that would have shown Clara teaching the game to Jane.
> 
> Deneb IV is a nod to the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which is partially set there. Draconia is a world referenced back in the Jon Pertwee era. The reference to alligators in New York's sewers refers to a longstanding urban legend. 
> 
> Annie Desmond is the character Jenna Coleman played in the 2012 miniseries Titanic. The Ninth and Seventh Doctors have been established as being either on or near the Titanic. Winnie Clarence was an echo of Clara's introduced in the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip "Blood and Ice".
> 
> I have taken the liberty of combining fictional Annie Desmond with a real-life individual named Violet Jessop who was indeed a crewmember of Titanic, survived the sinking, and went on to survive the mine attack and sinking of Titanic's sister ship, Brittanic, in WWI. I don't mention in the story, but Violet actually scored the trifecta by being aboard the Titanic's other sister ship, Olympic, when it had a serious accident (but didn't sink). The unsinkable Violet, who died in 1971, wrote a memoir of her experiences that was published posthumously as Titanic Survivor.
> 
> References are made to the Big Bang-related events of the First Doctor story "The Edge of Destruction" (a.k.a. "Inside the Spaceship") and the Fifth Doctor story "Terminus".
> 
> Stanley Unwin was a British comedian whose gimmick was speaking in a form of gibberish called gobbledygook. Outside the UK Unwin is probably best known for starring in Gerry Anderson's final Supermarionation series, The Secret Service.
> 
> The Old Ones were characters featured in numerous TV and expanded-franchise DW stories (such as the Gods of Ragnarok in 1988's "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy") who were said to have existed before the current version of the universe. 
> 
> Romana's outfit is meant to be the one she wore in her first appearance in "The Ribos Operation".


End file.
